


manu propria

by encroix



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 04:37:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3161462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/encroix/pseuds/encroix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The books don’t know who we are, he says.</p><p>And she laughs a quiet nervous laugh. No, she says. They don’t.</p><p>(general s1 spoilers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	manu propria

 

 

There are stories of girls who live in spite of the world, in spite of their destinies. 

Girls with long hair locked away in towers. Girls in glass coffins. Girls who go chasing the very thing that locks them away forever, just because they want to know what it feels like to be alive, to fight.

The stories are wrong.

Or, at least, this is not that story.

She is not those girls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Octavia is born with no name, to one parent, in a five hundred square foot tin box floating in orbit in the black of space.

At least princesses in towers have sprawl. Open sky, and the sight of birds and green.

She is contained in a smaller box within a box. Locked away like a monster, never able to argue for her own defense. Even criminals get to stand trial. But how do you argue for your right to exist in a place that calls your existence a crime?

Mother says _it’s for your own safety_.

Bellamy says _one of these days i’ll get you out. i’ll make sure that you’re safe._

Octavia doesn’t say anything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Living in a box is no more fun than living in a tower. At least, that’s what she assumes. She finds ways to fill the time, the gaps of silence -- the noise of scampering rodents in the vents beneath her box; the clicks of the Ark as it heats and cools, as it lives and breathes, as it idles and restarts; there are the occasional staccato rhythms of footsteps; the lonely echoes of pieces of conversation that float orphaned down the air of the hallways; and, her favorite, there are the moments when she can hear into the lives going on in other units.

For a while, it’s fine.

She likes stories. Reads as many as she can. (The only thing closer to having friends of your own is hearing adventures about others who _could have been_ your friends, especially when those friends are things like pirates. Cowboys. Princesses.) It’s easy enough to begin to piece together her own from the things she overhears.

Is Mrs. Akbar really seeing someone else besides her husband? Are the Doughertys really lying about having a child just to secure additional rations? And the unnamed neighbor easterly of their unit, what does he _do_ to those women who come by his unit each week?

In her head, she writes the story of her neighbors. Of her block.

After all, keeping it is almost as good as being able to tell your own, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mother says _it isn’t becoming to tell stories about other people, octavia._

Bellamy says _octavia just likes to listen to stories, mom. you can’t blame her._

Octavia opens her mouth. Says ----.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It doesn’t matter. There are books to fill the gaps, the stretches of loneliness when Mother is at the factory and Bellamy is at class, when there’s nothing but silence and the sprawl of five hundred compact square feet to keep her company during the day.

She can’t be attended.

She isn’t even supposed to be here.

But Bellamy brings her books from the library, and there are people and conversations enough there to satisfy her. She likes the love stories the best, she thinks. Or maybe the adventures, when there’s a thief or a prince, and a warrior or a princess, and they find each other without knowing what it is they’ve found.

Someone is always freed, and they walk into the sunset together.

She’s never seen a sunset.

From the stories, she hears it’s really something nice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her brother gives her a royal name, and she gives him this:

reads through the essays he writes for class, making notes and comments within the margin, correcting his mistakes.

He always looks embarrassed, and she wonders what kind of a place class is when something as simple as learning can make her brother -- her brother, who is scared of nearly nothing -- cower.

Bellamy shrugs, and says _i’m just no good at this sort of thing._

Mother says, _you’ll learn to be if you want to make something of your life._

Octavia says, _you_ are _good, bell. just keep practicing._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bellamy favors the histories, she knows, because the histories don’t favor him. He loves to binge on the lives of kings and soldiers, reading story upon story about lost worlds and fallen kingdoms that have gone the way of Earth. 

He crunches part of an apple between his teeth, holding up his inherited textbook, spine barely held together with tape and homemade glue, and says, _they were great because they_ made _themselves great. it wasn’t about destiny for them. just strength._

She snorts as she methodically proceeds through the third bag of rags Mother’s gotten from the factory. The cloth tears in two, a jagged sound harsh on the air, and she knows she’s said the wrong thing when the corner of Bellamy’s mouth tics.

_what?_

She shakes her head. _nothing_.

He goes back to speaking of kings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She knows better than to believe in his histories. Things that worked for worlds that are no longer, for people who are no longer are not things that can be trusted. Stories only survive for the winners. Who knows how many others have lost?

Kids from Factory don’t pin themselves as kings.

Kids without fathers don’t either.

And she knows that Bellamy expects it -- of himself, if not the world -- because Mother keeps telling him that. Over and over and over. As if the only way they can all survive is if Bellamy can manage to get everything lined up and become Chancellor one day. As if it’s easy. 

But she sees him, even if Mother doesn’t.

Sees how the Ark can wear a person down. Can make his shoulders slump and his mouth wrinkle into a frown.

There are other kids whose parents are part of the Council who move differently through the world. And she means that down to the way that they walk. She can hear it, the way their footfalls drop heavily onto the grating, steady and confident, even here, in the pits of the Ark where no one walks like they’re happy to live. Here, everyone’s just happy to survive to the next miserable day.

She wants him to be happy.

She wants him to have the things he wants for himself. He named her a princess, which makes him a prince, and he deserves all of those things. But in all of the things she’s read, the things she’s learned, one thing is clear enough: deserving something has little to do with whether or not you actually succeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bellamy comes home from class one afternoon with a dour expression. Mother’s away in the workrooms, and she’s patching spare pairs of pants for some extra coin when he bursts into the room, startling her. 

“You’re not supposed to be up,” he says.

Her jaw works. “I was helping mom out,” she says, lifting the pair of pants. “What’s the matter with you?”

He paces the room, back and forth and back and forth, just simmering.

She runs the needle through the fabric. Through and back, through and back, just waiting for him. 

He doesn’t say anything.

“Are you going to tell me what happened, Bell, or what?”

He scrubs at his face with his hand. “What, are you mom now or something?”

“I’m asking you what happened.”

“ _Nothing_ happened.”

“Something happened.”

A crumpled piece of paper gets fired in the direction of the wastebasket, knocking against the wall before ricocheting to the floor. She picks it up, smoothes it out.

“Your speech assignment?”

No grade at the top. Just a bright red SEE ME over the title.

She skims through the page and it sounds pretty good, from what she can tell. Full of the kinds of things he likes to read to her through the floor at night. The long rambling speeches from the history books he loves so much.

Bellamy reaches to snatch the paper from her hand, crumpling it back up and shoving it into the garbage.

“They thought I was cheating,” he says.

“What?” she says, eyes wide with disbelief. “Well, did you tell Ms. Errol that it was a mistake? That you wrote it yourself?”

“No,” he deadpans, rolling his eyes. “I let her think that I cheated. Of course I said something.”

“Well...” 

“It didn’t make a difference, O, okay? So can we just drop it?” 

“Maybe mom can talk to her for you.” 

“Forget it,” he says. “I didn’t care about it anyway. It was a dumb assignment.” 

Octavia pricks the skin of her thumb with the needle. “Bell...”

He rolls his shoulders, and she hears the joints pop. “I need to get ready to go to work,” he says. “I’ll see you later.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If this were a story, she knows exactly what she’d do. If this were a story, and she were a beleaguered warrior princess trapped in a tower, she’d free herself and head straight to the person -- no, the villain; people like that are always villains in these kinds of stories -- who did this to her brother, and she’d toss her one long braid behind her shoulder and wield her long, shining blade, and demand that they set it right. 

_you have to do the right thing_ , warrior princess Octavia from the Land Beneath the Floor would demand. _you can’t go around telling lies about people and taking away what’s rightfully theirs._

The teacher would cry ruefully at all of the harm that she’d caused and throw herself on her knees, kissing at the toes of her boots.

 _i didn’t know he was your brother, your majesty_ , his teacher would say. _please forgive me!_

_will you right this wrong?_

_of course, your majesty, of course_.

And while warrior princess Octavia would be forthright and just, she would also know that she would need to set an example, and that the teacher would need to be punished for accusing her brother of such misdeeds.

 _a week in the stocks for you!_ , she’d say, and all the people would clamor because they knew a crime of that magnitude demanded public execution. But warrior princess Octavia was as forgiving and sympathetic as she was just, and that would be the end of things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Life isn’t like her stories.

Bellamy gets an automatic zero on the assignment, and his average drops a grade point.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything changes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Rewind:

To understand everything that follows, there needs to be a beginning. The beginning is this: two kids who grow up under the eye of a terrified mother, constantly watching a closed door and listening for footsteps.

The beginning is a threaded needle passing in and out of coarse fabric, sewing a stitch. And a stitch. Building a seam.

The beginning is a girl kept under the floor like a secret because she is a secret, and there are two people she would take with her if she were ever destroyed in being spoken aloud.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 _i am not afraid_ , her mother makes her say. Makes her brother say. 

The words of her mother passing out of her mouth, out of her brother’s mouth, because this is the only lesson she can teach them.

_i am not afraid._

Not to be scared of whatever comes, even if it is death.

 _i am not afraid_. 

Heavy boots are at the door. Death is always coming.

 _i am not afraid_.

One day, Octavia understands, she will go; all secrets do in existing is wait to be told, and when hers is revealed, she will go with it, floating into the blank emptiness of space where not even sound carries.

_i am not afraid._

I wouldn’t let you go, Bellamy says. I’d protect you.

And Mother is paging through their ration letter at the table, scrubbing at her eyes and doing the figures in her head, eavesdropping and pretending not to. 

Sometimes the noble thing is letting them go, she says. That’s what the books say.

He takes her hand and squeezes it. 

The books don’t know who we are, he says.

And she laughs a quiet nervous laugh. No, she says. They don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 _and in the books, the noble warrior queen octavia thought to herself in the darkness,_ one day they will.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She is sent to the Sky Box.

Her mother goes to the sky.

Bellamy goes nowhere.

 

They all find their endings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She thinks the Ground looks like everything she’s read about. There’s the rippling sound of rushing water, and a heady sweetness on the air that must be from the pollen from the flowers. There’s a music all its own in the noise buzzing in the trees, and the light is so bright it hurts her eyes.

It seems like a dream.

To go from the blackness of space to all this sprawl, open land, lush and green, with soft earth beneath her feet and a fresh start, away from everything that trapped them in the past.

She looks at Bellamy.

This is their new beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It isn’t a new beginning at all. They’ve fallen somewhere in the middle of someone else’s world and someone else’s story, tripping over themselves to try to find a space they can carve for themselves.

They aren’t supposed to survive.

(She could laugh if it didn’t mean biting on her own tongue.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She doesn’t know what she expects to happen.

Bellamy treats her like his sister, and she reacts in any way that she can, reaching out to people and trying to carve a story for herself that spans seventeen odd years without any of the time or the space anyone else has. She cuts her hands against the rocks, gets dirt and mud deep under her fingernails, scrapes her knees, and kisses boys her brother doesn’t like.

She yells, and she screams, and listens as the wind carries it out.

She is here now, and she won’t let anyone forget it.

She is here.

Despite what they wanted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Bellamy stands high above the others, speaking to them to lead and only to lead, and they all listen. It’s just as she thought years ago on the Ark. Here, where they’re starting over, a brave new world with criminals and kids, he stands up and tells them to believe.

In whatever they want to believe in.

In him. 

In their own mistakes. Their own vices.

This is a land in their own image.

 

 

 

Her brother stands tall and carries himself with the power she’s always known he had, and the others look at him and listen.

 _we decide_ , he says, and the others cheer.

She looks at her brother, ringed with dim light in the dark.

 _we decide_ , she says, meeting his gaze.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bellamy says, _O, we’re really here, can you believe it?_

She says, _We fought to be here_.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fight never ends.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For her thirteenth birthday, Bellamy’s gift to her was another rescued copy of a book, tattered and nearly falling apart, but somehow still intact, pawned maybe or lifted from someone else. The pages were nearly all uneven, and the only things she could make out on the cover were characters.

蘭 辭

She ran her thumb over the text reverently. “Bell, what is this?”

He grinned, crossing his arms over his chest. “Just open it.”

The inside cover has a painting of a woman in some kind of armor. “I can’t read it,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I got the Hus down the row to translate it for me. Look inside.”

She paged through it quietly, seeing how the dried ink had bled through the thin paper in places, noting Mrs. Hu’s handwriting changed out for Mr. Hu’s more slanted script. 

“What did this cost you?” 

“As long as you like it,” he said, “it doesn’t matter.”

“Bell.”

He shrugged.

She hugged him and thanked him the only way she knew he’d appreciate -- she devoured the book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She stays up several hours past when she’s supposed to, straining to make out the words from whatever light manages to spill past the grate to her bed underneath the floor.

It’s a story of heroism, she’s figured that at least.

A girl goes to war for her father. 

A girl makes a friend among the enemy, and fights for her country because it is for her father.

A girl decides to die.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In case you are confused:

The girls in the stories go to war for their families.

Over their families.

Over their love.

 

 

 

 

She is not a girl from the stories.

She isn’t a fighter. She is the thing people go to war over to protect. She is the thing that dooms people to dying.

She finds herself arrested for a crime that she committed by being born, and does not say a word in defense. (What words are there?

 _i am alive_?)

She finds herself in a box full of other criminals, some of them murderers, and she has nothing else to say.

She picks no fights, chooses no battles, arms herself with nothing.

And even here, now, on the ground, when their survival depends on it, all she can do is look to the one person who has always known how to guide her, to protect her. Even now, she feels fear twist in her belly like an eel writhing on the sand, slippery and restless.

How could she ever have thought of herself differently?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stories write their mistakes out.

This is only an exercise in revision.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They try to flee.

(They can’t. The story must make itself an ending, and they are the ones who have landed here in someone else’s world, they are the invaders, they are a sacrifice to an angry god.

There is no more running.)

 

 

The fight finds them.

Just as it always has.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is another story.

(There is always another story.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like the legend of the man whose strength came from his hair, Octavia spends years underneath the floor sharpening her fearlessness until it becomes iron inside of her. With nothing else as weapon, she becomes one. Against the dark. Against the thoughts that simmer in her own head in the black of night and in the tiny confinement of her bedroom, a space so tiny they could only think to call it a _crawlspace_ on the blueprints.

Her brother is all brute force -- heavy punches and the weight of bodies, gritted teeth and strained muscles -- where she is all finesse, like finding the balance point on a blade and the sharp slick noise of a blade slipping through flesh.

She can pull down no columns, but she can be sharp. Sometimes that’s all that’s needed - a cut against the right place (the right vein, the right juncture) can bring an army down just the same.

 

 

 

 

(She grows her hair long anyway.

Just in case.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the story: 

They send a hundred kids to the ground, and don’t expect them to survive.

No, not the hundred.

The two of them.

(After all, kids from Factory don’t amount to anything. They go to the workrooms and the factories, just like their parents; they freeze and they starve, just like their parents; they steal and they lie and they die for their mistakes, just like their parents; they live and they give birth and they die, and Factory just keeps humming with dead life, buzzing with people who know their purpose is to have no purpose -- that purpose, like everything else, falls to those at the top first, and trickles down until it reaches them as a few thin droplets, diluted by the blood and the sweat of its journey.

Kids from Factory aren’t supposed to fight back.

Kids from Factory aren’t supposed to think of themselves as anything other than parts in a machine. 

She isn’t a kid from Factory. Neither is her brother.

But don’t get it confused -- that’s also all that they are. Motor oil and grime slick in their veins, thick against the fingers, because even when they sit at the head of the table, they are nothing more than kids from Factory who fought for a place, nothing more than unwanted dinner guests who get the seats dirty and use the wrong forks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is the truth?

The truth is she can only be how she sees herself, and how she sees herself is partly how others see her, and she is both. Bellamy is both.

Kids from Factory. More than, and also exactly the same.

If you understand, you understand. 

If you don’t, skip to the next chapter.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She makes her brother a paper crown.

He gifts her a wooden sword.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(No, you don’t understand -- both and neither; what matters is the verb, and the pronoun before it. 

They did this themselves.

Everything else is meaningless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coincidence or destiny? -- or isn’t that the same thing?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first time she picks up the sword, there is no singing choir, no sun that peeks through the clouds to tell her that she has found something important. 

There’s only the weight of it in her hand, the way her fingers seem to meet perfectly around its hilt.

Her hair swings in front of her shoulder, and she gives it a test swing. The air parts with a soft noise. 

She laughs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bellamy says _what do you think you’re doing?_

Octavia says _fighting for my home._

He shakes his head.

_fighting for us._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a fight coming. There is tension in the air, static and tense, and fear in the camp, and the noise of coming Grounders.

She has a weapon in her hand and iron in her spine. 

Her brother has words on the tip of his tongue and iron in his heart.

Octavia says, _if i can protect you, big brother, then let me._

Bellamy says, _i’m not going to let you die here_.

Octavia says, _you’re not going to let me do anything. i’m doing it._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She holds a sword.

Her brother stands, circled by people, ringed with light.

She calls his name and pushes through.

Her hand reaches for his, as he leans down to kiss the crown of her head.

Bellamy says, _we can do this_.

The corner of her mouth tics, her hand tightening on the handle of the blade.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She presses the pad of her thumb against the point. A little too much pressure and then her finger pulses as a drop of blood squeezes out of the tiny cut.

It falls to the ground.

She exhales, and tries to calm the rapid beat of her heart.

_i’m not afraid._

She meets Bell’s eyes from across the throng of people.

 _i’m not afraid_.

In the deep of the woods, she hears the low beat of drums.

 _i’m not afraid_.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the books, characters are always announcing allegiances and reasonings left and right, announcing to the world why it is they’re deciding to do whatever it is they’ve decided to do.

She hasn’t ever sat down to consider hers.

Here is the best she can come up with, the cover page to a book of her own writing.

 

 

 

No.

 

 

 

Here is her story, as she owns it and retells it for the other girls in the other stories in the language they understand:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her name is Octavia, of the house of Blake, from Factory Station in a land called the Ark, which was no land at all and has since been destroyed.

She was never supposed to exist.

She is a knight of the highest order, even against her own brother’s wishes. Her brother who once tried to kill the king - for her, to keep her safe - and now has ascended to king himself.

Her brother who was never supposed to succeed.

Her name is Octavia Blake, and she was named after royalty by a brother who exalted her. Her name is not a destiny. Her name is her name.

Her name is Octavia Blake, and she is fighting a war on the ground. Not for land or for vengeance or justice, but for herself. For her family. For king and country. For herself.

She doesn’t forgive those that try to write her out.

 

 

 

 

 

She was never meant to survive, and all that means is she’ll fight to ensure that she does.

You understand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her name is Octavia Blake.

You’ll remember.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The vague Mulan reference here is to the version of the legend as told in 隋唐演义 by 褚人获, which I haven't really seen float around on the Internet, but there you go.
> 
> I've been obsessed with the idea of Bellamy and Octavia as the king/hand dynamic forever (which S2 made so, so real), and this finally came into my head and gave me a chance to talk about it. Like a lot. (Sidenote that that Of Monsters & Men song everyone uses in every graphic about this ("King & Lionheart") was written about/for the lead singer's brother, which I think caps this super nicely.)
> 
> The title is a Latin phrase used mostly administratively to refer to documents, meaning _(signed) with one's own hand_. I take this directly from Wikipedia, and make no claims as to its accuracy.


End file.
